I’m sure you’ve read a ton of studies and articles about millennials in the workplace. They’re entitled, they’re unengaged, they bite off more than they can chew, etc. I’m a manager at my firm, and anecdotally this seems to be true of my younger employees, to varying degrees. Work seems like more of a chore to them than anything. I get that no one “loves” going to work, but I’m shocked at how flippantly they approach their careers. One particularly impetuous former staffer just up and quit to start a photography business. I couldn’t fathom doing something like that even now, let alone when I was his age and hanging on by a thread.

I see the “what” of millennials and how they act, but any idea as to the “why?” How you earn a living has always been important to me, but why does it seem less important to them? What am I missing?

Thanks,Bill

Bill,

To find some answers, let’s first look at the story arc of your average 20-something. They were born into a time when the world was about to change significantly. You had the tech boom and the dot-com bubble — so much of life and the news revolved around technology, innovation and creativity. For parents, it was all about raising the smartest, most well-rounded children possible; the thinking at the time was that if you just kind of heaped praise and self-esteem onto a kid, eventually he’d become self-actualized and the prophecy would fulfill itself. We were told to believe in ourselves, that we were the best and that we were capable of anything, provided we put our minds to it. Unsurprisingly, this led to a generation of people who, well, believed all of those things.

School was a big deal — it was the key to our success. The value of education was pounded into our heads from day one. When we performed well in school, we were given incentives like a monetary token or some other perk. It was very important to succeed in school so that we could get into esteemed and important colleges and universities, which was even more crucial along our paths to greatness. It’s so crucial that no one bats an eyelash at the prospect of going into insane amounts of debt just to pay for the privilege of doing even more work. Some people even went to graduate school, believing that the extra degree would give them an edge.

Regardless of how far we went, the message was the same: Knowledge is power. And since school is where we go to get that knowledge, we felt that academic success was one of — if not the — largest factors that determined how we’d end up as adults.

So we did all that. We spent thousands and thousands of dollars and years and years of our lives doing all this learnin’ and, now that we’ve graduated, you tell us that experience is what we need to get a job, not a bunch of pointless education. Basically, we all did exactly what we were told and now you’re telling us it was all for naught. That’s not how life has worked for us thus far. We succeed and we’re compensated for it. Get a good grade on a test and Dad gives you five bucks. Get good grades on lots of tests and you get to go to college. Do well in college and we’re supposed to have access to challenging, interesting high-paying jobs — but we don’t. We get stuck doing the shit work, the same low-level stuff that someone without our decades of formal education could do. For any job that sounds remotely interesting, even the “entry level” positions ask for five to 10 years of experience. Uh, when were you guys gonna tell us that? Some time back before we committed many thousands of dollars to useless liberal arts degrees would have been nice.

So, that’s the lens through which we approach work. We were promised a shot at greatness, but instead we’re making photocopies. That’s why millennials are so disengaged — the reality of working life is vastly different from what we were told to expect.